The Soul of the War | Page 3

shame that civilization itself, all the
ideals and intellectual activities and democratic progress of modern
Europe, would be thrust back into the primitive barbarities of war, with
its wholesale, senseless slaughter, its bayonet slashings and
disembowellings--"heroic charges" as they are called by the
journalists--and its gospel of hatred. So humanity was still beastlike, as
twenty centuries ago, and the message of Christianity was still unheard?
Socialistic theories, Hague conventions, the progress of intelligence in
modern democracy had failed utterly, and once again, if this war came
upon the world, not by the will of simple peoples, but by the
international intrigues of European diplomats, the pride of a military
caste and the greed of political tradesmen, the fields of Europe would
be drenched with the blood of our best manhood and Death would
make an unnatural harvesting. Could nothing stop this bloody business?
4
I think the Middle Classes in England--the plain men and women who
do not belong to intellectual cliques or professional politics--were
stupefied by the swift development of the international "situation," as it
was called in the newspapers, before the actual declarations of war
which followed with a series of thunder-claps heralding a universal
tempest. Was it true then that Germany had a deadly enmity against us,
and warlike ambitions which would make a shambles of Europe? Or
was it still only newspaper talk, to provide sensations for the breakfast
table? How could they tell, these plain, ignorant men who had always
wanted straightforward facts?

For years the newspaper press of England had been divided over
Germany's ambitions, precisely as, according to their political colour,
they had been divided over Tariff Reform or Home Rule for Ireland.
The Liberal Press had jeered at the hair-raising fears of the
Conservative Press, and the latter had answered the jeers by more
ferocious attacks upon German diplomacy and by more determined
efforts to make bad blood between the two nations. The Liberal Press
had dwelt lovingly upon the brotherly sentiment of the German people
for their English cousins. The Conservative Press had searched out the
inflammatory speeches of the war lords and the junker politicians. It
had seemed to the man in the street a controversy as remote from the
actual interests of his own life--as remote from the suburban garden in
which he grew his roses or from the golf links on which he spent his
Saturday afternoons as a discussion on the canals of Mars. Now and
again, in moments of political excitement, he had taken sides and
adopted newspaper phrases as his own, declaring with an enormous
gravity which he did not really feel that "The German Fleet was a
deliberate menace to our naval supremacy," or joining in the chorus of
"We want eight and we won't wait," or expressing his utter contempt
for "all this militarism," and his belief in the "international solidarity"
of the new democracy. But there never entered his inmost convictions
that the day might come during his own lifetime when he--a citizen of
Suburbia--might have to fight for his own hearthside and suffer the
intolerable horrors of war while the roses in his garden were trampled
down in mud and blood, and while his own house came clattering down
like a pack of cards--the family photographs, the children's toys, the
piano which he had bought on the hire system, all the household gods
which he worshipped, mixed up in a heap of ruin--as afterwards at
Scarborough and Hartlepool, Ipswich, and Southend.
If such a thing were possible, why had the nation been duped by its
Government? Why had we been lulled into a false sense of security
without a plain statement of facts which would have taught us to
prepare for the great ordeal? The Government ought to have known and
told the truth. If this war came the manhood of the nation would be
unready and untrained. We should have to scramble an army together,
when perhaps it would be too late.

The middle classes of England tried to comfort themselves even at the
eleventh hour by incredulity.
"Impossible!" they cried. "The thing is unbelievable. It is only a
newspaper scare!"
But as the hours passed the shadow of war crept closer, and touched the
soul of Europe.
5
In Fleet Street, which is connected with the wires of the world, there
was a feverish activity. Walls and tables were placarded with maps.
Photographs, gazetteers, time tables, cablegrams littered the rooms of
editors and news editors. There was a procession of literary adventurers
up the steps of those buildings in the Street of Adventure--all those men
who get lost somewhere between one war and another and come out
with claims of ancient service on the battlefields of Europe when the
smell of blood is scented from afar; and scores of new men